Goodbye Vista, Hello Ubuntu!

"I just made the switch! And I couldn't be happier! All is right with the world, and Linux is far better than Windows ever was! I don't miss anything, and Linux is awesomely superior in all ways! Upgrading to Linux was a snap. I just popped a CD in my PC, and it installed itself!"

Yeah, right.

Here's the real story of what happened.

I decided I was bored with my PC and very disappointed with Windows Vista. I had installed Vista back in September 2007, and I found it to be VERY SLOW at simple operations like copying files. If I wanted to move files from my USB key to my hard drive (how I back up my files from work my company tries to auto-delete using a script such as my outlook personal folders), I would insert the key, and then I would select the files and move them to my hard drive. Ten years later, the files were copied, and I had watched an episode of House, Bones, and The Reaper by the time it was done.

I knew I wanted to go back to XP, but Vista is just so darned pretty! Using Vista was like dating a horribly self-centered and beautiful woman: It was easy on the eyes, but all it did was TAKE TAKE TAKE.

I decided to explore my options and grab one of those Live CD's that lets you run Linux straight off the CD without actually installing it to see how you like it.

After 30 mins, I had downloaded the 740 MB download and burned it to a CD. I actually had to burn three CD's:

1. Vista auto-burns as a read/write filesystem instead of a normal data CD, so I threw this one in the trash.
2. I thought I had told Vista not to do that again, but it did it anyway. CD #2 also met its maker in the trash can.
3. I finally got this one right.

I then rebooted my PC, holding down the DEL key to get into the BIOS. I made sure that my CMOS was configured to boot from a CD, and then I saved my settings and the system restarted.

Upon rebooting, I realized the CD was not in the tray, so I pushed the restart button as soon as I saw the stupid Vista logo popping up.

Then I finally saw the Ubuntu logo when my computer booted. THERE IT WAS! IT'S WORKING!!!

Nope. It bombed out halfway through and gave me a terrible error.

(initramfs) ata3.0 failed to set xfermode errors

I searched for about 4 hours before I finally found a useful posting that told me what was happening when my PC was trying to boot up and use Ubuntu Linux. It turns out that my SATA II hard drive in my PC that I built myself was plugged into slot 1. My cheap motherboard apparently rides an IDE and a SATA signal piggyback with each other. Windows Vista doesn't care and handles it fine, but Linux pukes out on me. I opened up the PC case, and I unplugged my hard drive cable from slot 1 and put it into slot 5. I moved the DVD writer plug from slot 2 to slot 6.

Reboot.

Success!

I took a look around inside Ubuntu Linux, liked what I saw, and decided I would set it up to dual boot.

More in the next posting...

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Links from this article:

• The Ubuntu Home Page
• The Ubuntu download page for the Live CD (which is also the install CD)
• The solution I found to my boot issue